Conditionally load stubs based on specific version of package installed

[mkurnikov]

For django-stubs, we would like to be able to load stubs conditionally, like it's done for typeshed via https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/common_issues.html#python-version-and-system-platform-checks

See typeddjango/django-stubs#262

I'd like to propose to add a special function is_package_installed for stub files:

if is_package_installed('Django>=3.0.*')
    class Django30Class: ...
else:
    class Django22Class: ...

which will evaluate according to the rules specified in PEP440 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0440/#version-specifiers

It was discussed in python/typeshed#153, current workaround seems to be (from python/typeshed#153 (comment)):

release and install a separate stub package for each version of the library

I believe it's too complex, as one needs to maintain lots of separate branches for specific versions of the supported package. And versioning of the stubs package would then be PACKAGE_VERSION.STUBS_VERSION_INCREMENT?

[sobolevn]

I am also interested in how stubs resolution / merge works in this case.

For example:

• what if new functions / classes are added to a new version?
• what if their types are changed?
• what if something is removed from the future version?